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Leonard Cohen y el Zen By Alberto Manzano – Now Released

Leonard Cohen y el Zen By Alberto Manzano is now available. The following information is from the French Amazon site via Google Translate:

In mid-1993, after the presentation tour of The Future was over, Leonard found no reason to continue in Los Angeles. He could not enjoy the success that his work had given him, his love affair with Rebecca de Mornay had come to an end and he felt gripped by a deep depression. It was then that he packed his bags, picked up his Pathfinder and headed to the Mount Baldy Buddhist monastery.

For more than fifty years, the need for a complete self-reformation led Leonard Cohen to a spiritual search through the study of Zen and Hinduism, an immense and profound personal work whose reward he finally obtained in the last years of his life.

Alberto Manzano is a poet, translator, essayist, biographer, anthologist, journalist, music producer, adapter of lyrics in Spanish. He has published numerous works in reference to Leonard Cohen, among which Leonard Cohen (Dome / Planet, 2009). He has released albums about Leonard Cohen and has translated more than a hundred lyrics of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith among others. He is also the author of poetry and several anthologies on rock.

Leonard’s relationship with Zen Buddhism had begun in 1972, when a new depressive crisis – probably inherited from his mother, Masha, who would end up in a psychiatric ward at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal – was squeezing him out. Until then, the depression had worked perfectly as one of the main engines of his poetic work, but it had become a chaotic spiral of suffering in which Leonard fell too often: “You live with depression as if you were a friend, knowing if you make too many mistakes, that friend will fall on you, “he confessed” the most powerful non-chemical depressant in the world, “as he had been described by a prestigious British music magazine after the publication of his album Songs Of Love And Hate in 1971, He pointed: “With the disks of Leonard Cohen should give razor blades, because it is a music to cut the veins.” However, the wounded poet continued arguing about depression: “It’s not something that is objective, it’s more like a shadow that you live with and that never disappears, so you start to move in a certain way to avoid being crushed. It’s like living with an eczema, a skin disease: if you eat inappropriate things, the skin becomes red, swollen, to the point where you are unable to move, unable to sit down and unable to go to bed, and this is how depression works. you absorb the inappropriate, you feel too uncomfortable to continue.”

Alberto Manzano Lizandra

I first read Leonard in 1972. It was “Selected Poems”, first book published in Spain: “Poemas escogidos” (Plaza & Janes, 1972). He was the first poet that really touched me. No one else will touch me the same.

Credit Due Department: Dominique BOILE provided the covers of Leonard Cohen y el Zen, which includes two of Dominique’s photos of Leonard (Paris, 2007 and 2013), and information about author Alberto Manzano. Laurence of Paris alerted me to the book review. Dominique BOILE forwards the covers of the just-published Leonard Cohen y el Zen By Alberto Manzano, which includes two of Dominique’s photos of Leonard (Paris, 2007 and 2013), and biographical information about the author.

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